


In The End

by jessicaltx



Category: Dream SMP - Fandom, Minecraft (Video Game), Video Blogging RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Dream Team SMP Setting (Video Blogging RPF), Angst, Dream Team SMP Angst (Video Blogging RPF), Emotional Hurt, Gen, I put Quackity through so much pain in this whoops, I'm Sorry, Karl just needs to figure his shit out, Memory Loss, Role-Playing Game, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-15
Updated: 2021-02-15
Packaged: 2021-03-17 15:36:00
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,326
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29474088
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jessicaltx/pseuds/jessicaltx
Summary: Time travel has been taking more and more out of Karl each time he gets thrown into a different timeline. The Inbetween is hard to traverse, he hasn't quite found the answers he seeks and he doesn't know where to look next. It's ruining him more than he ever thought it would. When Karl falls back into step at home with another travelling journey in his library, he doesn't realise just how much his last trip has taken from him until he meets someone in L'Manburg, someone he's supposed to know better than anyone else in the world.
Relationships: Alexis | Quackity/Karl Jacobs, Alexis | Quackity/Karl Jacobs/Sapnap, Karl Jacobs/Sapnap
Comments: 3
Kudos: 130





	In The End

**Author's Note:**

> Check out my Twitter @uhhjessa for more things like this! I write Dream SMP theories, headcanons and minifics on there most of the time and I'm always creating some kind of theory for the SMP lore!

It had been a particularly rough journey.

It never got any easier for Karl not knowing when he was going to time travel, not knowing where he was going to end up or who he was going to end up with. It was draining every single time the world took him away to a place he had never been.

And he went back to The Inbetween again. That place still felt unfamiliar, yet familiar, to him despite the number of times he had been. Each time he was forced to visit he would only remember parts. He hadn’t explored deep enough yet but he was trying.

He was trying so hard to make everything right.

Karl had tried so hard to save them this time, had tried so hard to right the wrongs of the timeline but in the end, it didn’t even matter. He couldn’t save them all. There had been losses, there had been wreckage and there was nothing he could’ve done at that moment to save it. He had pushed himself further than he ever had to no sort of avail.

Maybe he would be allowed to go back and try again one day? Maybe he could save them.

It would be dangerous but wasn’t that a risk he had agreed to take? Losing himself in the processes of righting the wrongs of others was the sacrifice he knew he had to make to fix everything. What it meant to him would eventually be a memory of a time when he tried so hard, got so far but maybe he could fix things, save everybody.

But not today. No, not today. He needed a moment to regroup his thoughts.

Karl huffed out a sigh, feeling more drained now than he had ever felt, closing the cover of the diary entry he had been writing. His handwriting had become more rushed, more scrawled, as time went on but as long as he could still read it back, remember where he had been, who he had saved, that was all that mattered.

As long as he remembered who he was.

The boy threw his head back, puffing another breath towards the wooden ceiling of his secret library before standing from his chair. This new library felt safer than the other, the one which had been hidden within the walls of the L’Manburg crater. This new library in his new home hid his secrets better than his old library ever could have.

Karl wandered over to his chest and locked his diary entry away within it. They were piling up now, each diary entry memory of what he had been through while travelling, each one with the cryptic message at the end, _“Don’t forget who you are.”_

Because he couldn’t. He could never forget who he was. It would ruin everything.

Puffing out another sigh, Karl decided to go for a walk. Maybe he could go back to L’Manburg to see how bad the egg spread had gotten - that was one of the only things about the place that Karl could truly remember, the corruption. It was becoming worrying how quickly it was spreading but there were things he could do about it. He just needed time to put plans into place, get people to safety. It would just take time.

As he wandered and the closer he got to where he had memorised L’Manburg to be - worried the entire time that he would forget where his new home was as he was exploring - he passed build sites, new and old, that he didn’t recognise but knew he probably once did. Monuments and structures which sparked no recognition in him at all but he knew there was every chance he had had a hand in building them.

This was what it was like for him now. Seeing things, meeting people, that he knew he should remember, he just didn’t. The inside of his head was almost like a clean slate and that was what was worrying him. Karl knew he needed to get a move on with exploring The Inbetween. The one thing he did remember, the one thing he knew for certain, was that there were aspects of that place, things he didn’t understand just yet, which would help him in regaining all of the memories he had lost and help him stop further regressing into a headspace where he barely remembered his way back home.

When Karl reached the L’Manburg crater, a place which once housed a thriving country, he couldn’t help but find himself wandering to where his old library had once been. This is where it had all started - the secrets, the loss of memory, the travelling. This was the place that had protected him long enough that still, nobody knew who he was.

The holes in the wall where his wooden shack and library had once been hidden hadn’t been filled in by anyone. Nothing in L’Manburg had been rebuilt. Nobody had even tried. It was an explosion which cost them a whole country, a tragedy frozen in time.

A tragedy which Karl barely remembered.

A few more trips, a few more journeys through time, and L’Manburg and its history would be completely wiped from Karl’s memory. That was the scariest part of having no control over his time travel; knowing that even though he was trying his hardest not to, and trying his hardest to fix it, Karl was losing every piece of his memory, even the memory of himself and who he was, and there was nothing at that moment that he could do about it. He didn’t know where in The Inbetween to look anymore.

He grew more lost the more that time whizzed by.

The boy heard footsteps a little ways away from him but didn’t turn to see who it was. He hoped they would ignore him as they passed by and not stop to talk - he didn’t know quite how much social interaction his fatigued self could take at that moment.

Karl saw a shadow pause in front of him and he jumped as someone began to speak.

“Karl! There you are. Why did I know this is where you would be? Goddamn, you look rough - no offence. Where’ve you been man, I feel like I haven’t seen you in forever.”

_That voice_ … Karl didn’t recognise that voice.

There was a part of him that felt like he should recognise the voice, but he didn’t. He tugged around amongst his memory bank for a name or a face to put to the voice but none came. Maybe this was the new sacrifice? The loss of memory of this person. He had to do that sometimes, lose sight of certain people in his life to right the wrongs of others, lose memories in order to keep the peace and keep people he barely knew safe.

“Karl? Are you okay?”

The boy spun on his heels to face the direction the voice was coming from to be met with another person, a boy around his height, giving him a concerned kind of look.

That face… No, Karl didn’t recognise his face either. He couldn’t even pull out a name.

The sweater though, the navy sweater… it seemed familiar somehow as if he had seen it before. The sweater was the only thing about the boy that struck him as familiar. Maybe this had been a friend of his? Karl knew he had lost a couple of those while time travelling to make things right. This wouldn’t have been the first that he had lost.

“You’re being _really_ weird, dude.” The boy before him took a step closer, looking Karl up and down as if trying to find something in his face, something he couldn’t quite see. “It’s like you’re looking right through me. Where did you go? What happened?”

Karl took a step back without realising he was doing it. The boy was getting too close for his liking. Karl didn’t miss the hurt that flashed across the boy’s face before it was masked again, gone in an instant as if it had never been there in the first place.

“I’m sorry-'' Karl paused briefly, looking the boy up and down a few times, raking every memory he had in his head to try and pull anything, maybe even a tendril of familiarity, to tie this boy to someone he knew, but he couldn’t do it. There was nothing there.

_“Who are you?”_

Just because Karl didn’t know this boy didn’t mean he didn’t feel for him. There was a tug at his heartstrings as the boy in front of him stopped dead in his tracks to try and make his way closer to him. Karl watched as his face fell, not quite to a frown but more to a look of disbelief. He was confused, Karl could see it swimming in his gaze on him.

“You’re messing with me, aren’t you?” The boy’s eyes locked onto Karl’s and within the confusion, buried underneath the disbelief was deep-rooted fear, hard to reach terror. He was _afraid_. “Why would you say that? You know who I am, Karl. You’re not stupid.”

The boy tried to take another step towards Karl only for him to take one right back.

He tried again to root through his memory, searching for something, _anything_ that could tie him to this boy but nothing came up. His last journey had been a particularly tough one. Maybe it had taken more this time? Maybe he was pushing too hard.

“I’m sorry,” Karl tried to make his words sound as genuine as possible, “but I don’t think we’ve met before. Maybe you somehow have me confused with someone else?”

A look of pure terror crossed the boy’s face and Karl felt his chest twinge.

“Wait, wait, wait-” the boy in front of him waved his hands slightly, rubbing the back of his neck anxiously as he looked between Karl and the ground between them- “this is a trick, right? You’re tricking me? Karl, it’s me, Alex. You know who I am, you’re my be-”

“I’m sorry.” Karl felt like he was repeating himself but what else could he do? The boy before him, Alex - he didn’t even recognise his name, there was no familiarity to it, almost as if he had never heard it before - was clearly in distress and all Karl felt like he was capable of doing at that moment was apologising. “But I don’t know any Alex’s.”

The boy’s face twisted again, some kind of mixture of terror and pure panic.

“You- you seriously have no idea who I am?” His voice was soft and Karl felt his chest twinge again, pained by the sound of this unfamiliar boy’s broken tone. “But you’re my best friend. Karl and Quackity, remember? Where did you go, man? What happened?”

Quackity tried to take another step towards Karl - he kept doing that, almost as if he could make Karl remember if he was close enough - but Karl stepped back away from him again. They were going in circles with this. Karl didn’t want him to stand too close.

“Did you hit your head?” Quackity sounded panicked now, his voice trembling. Karl could tell he was trying to suppress it. “What happened? Where did you go that made you forget? You can’t have just forgotten everything just like that, I mean-”

“Nothing happened.” The words came out sharper than Karl had intended them to but he couldn’t take it back now. He hated it when people questioned where he had been too much, it made him feel like he wasn’t being safe enough with his power like one more slipup would cause everyone to know his secret. He couldn’t let that happen.

Whoever resided in The Inbetween had told him to keep everything a secret.

“But obviously something _did_ happen!” Karl could see Quackity growing increasingly more upset as their conversation continued - he tried to ignore the tears he could see building up in his eyes, not wanting to see how much his loss of memory was affecting the boy before him. “How do you forget your own _fiancé_?!” It hasn’t been _that_ long.”

_Fiancé_? But hadn’t Quackity just called himself Karl’s best friend? Karl couldn’t remember this boy ever being his best friend, _nevermind_ his fiance.

This was bad. This whole situation was _dangerous_.

Karl had pushed himself so far this time that he had forgotten about one of the most important people in his life. He had absolutely no idea who Alex Quackity was, what role he was supposed to have in his life and now here he was, emotional and quite frankly angry at Karl and he was _confused_. He was going to start asking questions.

Karl needed to get out of there before he was past the point of no return.

“I’m sorry-” Karl raised his hands almost in a surrender position as he slowly began to back away - trying to avoid the L’Maburg crater as best as he could - keeping his eyes locked on the nape of Quackity’s sweater to avoid his eyes- “but I really need to-”

“You can’t just leave it like this, Karl!” There was a violent break in Quackity’s voice as he yelled at Karl and it stopped the boy in his tracks. “You can’t just come here after being away forever, say you have no idea who I am and _run away_! I can’t let you.”

Karl swallowed the emotion in his throat down. He couldn’t let Quackity get involved in this. He had no idea who he was but he was not going to let him get hurt by being too deeply involved in the time-travelling world. He had enough respect for him for that.

“What about Sapnap?” Quackity seemed to have gotten the hint now that Karl didn’t want him standing too close as he didn’t try to step towards him anymore. “You remember Sapnap, right? Your other fiancé? You have two of them, by the way.”

Sapnap… Karl didn’t recognise that name either.

_Fuck_. Why couldn’t Karl remember anything? How hard had he pushed himself this time around? He had passed so many buildings on his way to L’Manburg that he couldn’t ever remember having seen and now he couldn’t remember that he had had literal fiancés the last time he had been in this timeline. What the hell had happened?

“I-” Karl paused, mulling it over in his head whether it would be worth it to upset Quackity any further- “I don’t know a Sapnap either. I don’t know what you’re talking about, I quite frankly don’t know how you know me but this is really freaking me out.”

Karl saw the terror in Quackity’s face deepen as it blended in with his newfound despair. Even from the distance between them, Karl could see the tears on his face and he tried not to let it get to him too much. He didn’t know this guy. It wasn’t his fault.

“This is really freaking _you_ out?” Quackity puffed out what sounded like a sarcastic chuckle but Karl couldn’t have been sure. “How do you think _I_ feel? My best friend has just come back from wherever he disappeared to and he doesn’t know who anyone is!”

Karl hated the fact that he was yelling at him.

From what he could remember, he had just come back from a timeline where most of the time, there had been yelling and shouting and crying out, and the shrill noises were still ringing through his ears like a church bell. Everything hurt, he was exhausted yet here he was, standing in the middle of L’Manburg fighting with a stranger.

“What about karaoke night?” Quackity seemed to be pressing boundaries, almost as if he was trying to delve into Karl’s mind himself to pull memories out that weren’t there anymore. “With me, you, Sapnap, George and Dream? Do you remember that?”

Karl had a feeling Quackity already knew the answer, he was just trying to be hopeful. He had just named a list of people that Karl didn’t recognise. Maybe Dream… the name Dream rang alarm bells in his head like his subconscious was telling him that that was someone he should stay away from, someone with who he shouldn’t be involved with.

“I don’t know how many times I have to tell you that I don’t know who you are!” Karl really didn’t want to be too harsh with him but being kind clearly wasn’t getting the message through. “Alex, Quackity, whatever name you go by! I’ve never met you before in my life! And you trying to force me to remember isn’t doing either of us any good!”

Karl could feel his own eyes burning now, his tears mirroring the ones which were still falling down Quackity’s face, but his tears were frustrated tears. He was so _frustrated_.

Frustrated that he couldn’t remember the boy in front of him when he had clearly meant a lot to him at some point in his life, frustrated that he had pushed himself so hard and so far that his time-travel had stolen more from him than it ever had before, frustrated with himself that he had upset Quackity so, had made him cry, when he seemed like the kind of person who rarely ever got so upset that he showed emotion.

But most of all, Karl was frustrated with The Inbetween. For not making it easier on him, for not showing him the way more. He had been traversing that place for what felt like forever, looking for the answer, looking for the solution to his memory loss. It was in there somewhere, the answer to how he could retrieve every memory, every person and building and momentous event that had slipped from his mind on his travels. But it felt like trying to find a needle in a haystack. It wasn’t easy and that was frustrating.

Karl was losing every piece of himself while trying to keep himself whole.

“I can’t believe this is happening right now.” Karl could see Quackity’s hands trembling as he paced slightly in the grass. “I can’t believe I’ve just lost my fiancé and my best friend within minutes of seeing him again. I just- I don’t understand what’s happening right now. How do you just totally forget someone? How does that even work, Karl?”

There it was again. Another burning feeling of frustration in his gut. Karl was frustrated at the world for making it so he couldn’t explain to Quackity why all of this was happening, why his supposed fiancé had suddenly forgotten who he was entirely.

“I wish I could explain it but I don’t know either.” Karl had always been a good liar, so why was lying to Quackity so hard now? “Quackity, I- I’m sorry. I don’t even know what I’m apologizing for but you’re clearly upset. Maybe I meant something to you once upon a time but I don’t know you so how am I supposed to pretend that I care?”

Letting him go harshly. Karl was trying to convince himself that that would stop him from wanting answers, to stop him from wanting to come back to him and try again.

“So this is it, then?” Quackity’s hands were still trembling and it seemed to get worse the more upset he got. “You don’t know who any of us are and you’re giving up?”

“If giving up is what I have to do for you to leave me alone then yes, _I’m giving up_.”

Unable to even imagine what the look on Quackity’s face would be, Karl turned on his heel to head back in the direction of his new home. He turned and walked away from one of the only people who had ever truly known who he was through and through.

But Karl didn’t remember him… _so why would it matter_?


End file.
